Stefani Reeder is building on a singer-songwriter career that got jumpstarted by the Tri-C High School Rock Off

View full sizeStefani Reeder, a participant in the 2010 Tri-C High School Rock Off, has her sights set on a career in music. Her EP, âRoots & The Truth,â is due out in April.Photo courtesy of Stefani Reeder

Stefani Reeder experienced a watershed year in 2010. Despite her protestations, Jim Boardwine, one of her teachers at Streetsboro High School entered her in the Tri-C High School Rock Off.

Reeder, who said she suffered from "horrible stage fright," didn't win, but the path hewn out of the forest then was clear.

"As a performer, I thought she connected to the audience the minute she started singing," said Barry Gabel, the Rock Off's creator and senior vice president of marketing and sales for concert promoter Live Nation. "As a songwriter, I thought she had good sensibilities for a high school kid. It was just a matter of finding her muse, honing her writing skills, finding good mentors and performing live to get that comfortable audience/performer groove."

Three years later, Reeder seems on her way. Her EP, "Roots & The Truth," is being mixed by longtime mentor (and another teacher at Streetsboro) Gabriel Swarts, and is due for an early April release.

A listen to the raw tracks shows that Reeder seems to have found the muse Gabel mentioned.

"I've tried all sorts of genres," Reeder said in a call to her Streetsboro home, where she was preparing for a temporary move to stay with her sister in Salt Lake City to check out the music scene.

"Back in the Rock Off, I was trying to be this progressive rock singer, but it wasn't working for me," she said. "We didn't like it as well, and didn't mesh in that genre, so I tried to move to a softer side, like back when I started.

"I wrote singer-songwriter ballads, but for some reason, I was in denial that that was what I was good at," she said.

View full sizeStreetsboro native Stefani Reederâs EP, âRoots & The Truth,â recorded at Kentâs Engine Room Recording studio, will be out in April.

Reeder, who began writing songs when she was 15, said she has about a hundred songs in her catalog. Whether any of those see the light of Swarts' Engine Room Recording studio in Kent is up in the air. But it is a safe bet that the file of songs will grow rapidly in the near future.

That's because Reeder didn't get a chance to do as much writing as she wanted while working as a vet tech at a local animal hospital, but now that she's relocating, the pen should get busy, she said.

The move to Utah is somewhat symptomatic of the vagabond in Reeder. Back in 2012, she relocated for a while to Nashville for about six months. But it wasn't her first trip to Music City. That came back in 2010 – yeah, that watershed year – when she went to Tennessee to audition for "American Idol."

"I always wanted to go there," she said of her move south. "I saved up the money and went. It's more about country, but it has its moments around jazz, pop and rock."

Ironically, while Reeder said she's been told – correctly – that she has a voice that would fit the country genre, it was Nashville's country proclivity that shortened her stay.

"That's what chased me away in a sense, the whole country scene," she said. "I was there for six months, from February to August or September of 2012."

When asked to describe her sound, Reeder said: "I've gotten Jewel a lot, but I don't know. For some reason, I can't hear it. I definitely don't consider her a big influence of mine."

She laughed and acknowledged that she doesn't sound anything at all like the prog-rocker she started out to be.

And it all began – sort of – with the Rock Off.

Reeder's songs are not really happy tunes, which she said is kind of surprising.

"A lot of my stuff is not happy, peppy music," said Reeder. "It's more like dark and dull. For some reason, that's what comes out, even though I'm not a dark person."

And the light came on – so to speak -- with the Tri-C High School Rock Off.

A more recent song, "Sisu,'' written by Stefani Reeder and Brian Poston

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